PHILADELPHIA, PA.- White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart presents the work of artists engaged with clothing, adornment, and self-presentation to highlight the inventive design, tactical implementation, or sartorial sense by which we multiply and complete our personalities. On view in ICAs First Floor Space February 6 through July, 28, 2013, this group exhibition takes inspiration from this definition by novelist JG BallardFashion: A recognition that nature has endowed us with one skin too few, and that a fully sentient being should wear its nervous system externally.

Artworks in a variety of media infuse garments with a distinctive sense of posethe exclusive province of neither the advertisement nor the runwayto stand, statue-like, with an attitude perfumed by immense mediation and an unsteady social sphere. With examples from outlandish costumes to self-published magazines, jewelry to sculpture, performance to painting, this sensibility permeates all fields. Oscillating between branding, self-recognition, sexuality, political uniform, and economic indicator, our adornment always reflects a chosen position in and with society. Told time and time again that ours is a narcissistic age, how do we positively reveal or covertly enact desires before the mirror of our time?